Sanders raised his glass to Suzanne. "I suppose one could call it wonderful," he said. "It's a matter of degree-I was unprepared for everything here."
"How marvelous-you'll never forget it." Suzanne sat forward. She wore her long black hair in an unusual manner, well forward over her face, so that it concealed her cheeks. "Tell me about it all, Edward, I-"
"My dear." Max held up his hand. "Give the poor man time to catch his breath. Besides, he'll want a meal now, and then to get to bed. We can discuss it all over breakfast." To Sanders he explained: "Suzanne spends a lot of time wandering through the forest."
"Wandering-?" Sanders repeated. "What do you mean?"
"Only through the fringes, Edward," Suzanne said. "We're on the edge of the forest here, but there's enough-I've seen those jeweled vaults." With animation, she said: "A few mornings ago when I went out before dawn my slippers were beginning to crystallize- my feet were turning into diamonds and emeralds!"
With a smile, Max said: "My dear, you're the princess in the enchanted wood."
"Max, I _was_-" Suzanne nodded, her eyes gazing at her husband as he looked down at the carpet. She turned to Sanders, "Edward, we could never leave here now."
Sanders shrugged. "I understand, Suzanne, but you may have to. The affected area is spreading. God only knows what the source of all this is, but there doesn't seem much prospect of stopping it."
"Why try?" Suzanne looked up at Sanders. "Shouldn't we be grateful to the forest for giving us such a bounty?"
Max finished his drink. "Suzanne, you're moralizing like some missionary. All Edward wants at this moment is a change of clothes and a meal." He went over to the door. "I'll be with you in a moment, Edward. There's a room ready for you. Help yourself to another drink."
When he had gone, Sanders said to Suzanne, as he filled his glass with soda: "You must be tired. I'm sorry to have kept you up."
"Not at all. I sleep during the day now-Max, and I decided we should keep the dispensary open round the clock." Aware that the explanation was not wholly convincing, she added: "To be frank, I prefer the night. One can see the forest better."
"That's true. You're not frightened of it, Suzanne?"
"Why should I be? It's so easy to be more frightened of one's feelings than of the things that prompt them. The forest isn't like that-I've accepted it, and all the fears that go with them." In a quieter voice, she added: "I'm glad you're here, Edward. I'm afraid Max doesn't understand what's happening in the forest-I mean in the widest sense-to all our ideas of time and mortality. How can I put it? 'Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, stains the white radiance of eternity.' I'm sure you understand."
Carrying his glass, Sanders walked across the darkened room. Although his eyes had become accustomed to the dim light, Suzanne's face still remained hidden in the shadows behind the blackwood cabinet. The faintly quizzical smile that had hovered about her mouth since his arrival was still there, almost beckoning to him.
As he drew closer to her, he realized that this slight upward inclination of the mouth was not a smile at all, but a facial rictus caused by the nodular thickening of the upper lip. The skin of her face had a characteristic dusky appearance, which she had managed to hide by her long hair and a lavish use of powder. Despite this camouflage, he could see the nodular lumps all over her face and in the lobe of her left ear as she drew back fractionally in her chair, raising her shoulder. Already, after his years of experience at the leper hospital, he recognized the beginnings of the so-called leonine mask.
Confused by this discovery, although he had halfanticipated it since Suzanne's first letter to him from Mont Royal, Sanders moved away across the room, hoping Suzanne had failed to notice the telltale way in which he had spilt some of his drink on to the carpet. His first feelings of anger at this crime of nature against someone who had already spent much of her own life trying to cure others of the disease, gave way to a sense of relief, as if this particular disaster were one for which both of them were psychologically well prepared. He realized that he had been waiting for Suzanne to catch the disease, that for him this had probably been her one valid role. Even their affair had been an unconscious attempt to bring about this very end. It was himself, and not the poor devils in the _léproserie_, who had been the real source of infection for Suzanne.
Sanders finished his drink and put it down, then turned to face Suzanne. Despite their previous closeness, he found it almost impossible to express himself to her. After a pause, he said lamely: "I was sorry you left Fort Isabelle at the time, Suzanne. In fact, it was an effort to stop myself following you straightaway. I'm glad you came, though. It may seem a strange choice to some people, but I understand. Who could blame you for trying to escape from the dark side of the sun?"
Suzanne shook her head, either puzzled by this cryptic reference or preferring not to understand it. "What do you mean?"
Sanders hesitated. Although she appeared to be smiling, Suzanne was in fact trying to control this involuntary movement of her mouth. Her once elegant face was twisted by a barely concealed scowl.
He gestured. "I was thinking of our patients at Fort Isabelle. For them-"
"It's nothing to do with them. Edward, you're tired, and I have to be at the dispensary. I mustn't keep your supper any longer." With a brisk movement, Suzanne stood up, her slim figure taller than Sanders. Her powdered face looked down at him with the skull-like intensity he remembered in Ventress. Then once again the deformed smile supervened.
"Good night, Edward. We'll see you at breakfast, you have so much to tell us."
Sanders stopped her at the door. "Suzanne-"
"What is it, Edward?" She half-closed the door, shutting out the light from the corridor that cut across her face.
Sanders fumbled for something to say, and in a kind of half-remembered reflex raised his arms to embrace her. Then, as much attracted as repelled by her injured face, but knowing that he must first understand his own motives, he turned away.
"There's nothing to tell you, Suzanne," he said. "You've seen everything here in the forest."
"Not everything, Edward," Suzanne told him. "One day you must take me there."
11 The white hotel
The next morning, wearing the dead man's clothes, Sanders met Louise Peret. He had spent the night in one of the four empty chalets that formed the sides of a small courtyard behind the Clairs' bungalow. The remainder of the European medical staff had left the hospital, and before breakfast Sanders wandered through the deserted chalets, trying to prepare himself for the coming meeting with Suzanne. The few books and magazines left behind on the shelves and the unused cans in the kitchen were like the residue of a distant world.
His new suit had been the property of a Belgian engineer at one of the mines. The man, roughly his own age, he assumed from the cut of the trousers and jacket, had died some weeks earlier of pneumonia. In the pockets of the jacket Sanders found small pieces of bark and a few dried leaves. Sanders speculated whether the man had caught his final chill while gathering these once-crystallized objects from the forest.
Suzanne Clair did not appear at breakfast. When Sanders arrived at the Clairs' bungalow and was shown into the dining-room by the houseboy, Max Clair greeted him with a raised forefinger.
"Suzanne is sleeping," he told Sanders. "She had quite a night, poor dear-a lot of natives are hanging around in the bush, hoping to reap themselves a harvest of diamonds, I suppose. They've brought their sick with them, incurables for the most part. What about you, Edward? How do you feel this morning?"
"Well enough," Sanders said. "Thanks for the suit, by the way."
"Your own is dry now," Max said. "One of the boys pressed it earlier this morning. If you want to change-?"
"That's all right. This one is warmer, anyway." Sanders felt the blue serge fabric. The darker material in some way seemed more appropriate to his present meeting with Suzanne than his cotton tropical suit, a fitting disguise for this nether world where she slept by day and
appeared only at night.
Max ate his breakfast with relish, working with both hands at his grapefruit. Since their meeting the previous night he had relaxed completely, almost as if Suzanne's absence gave him his first chance to lower his guard with Sanders. At the same time, Sanders guessed that he had been deliberately allowed his few minutes alone with Suzanne, to make his own brief judgment, if any, on why she and Max had come to Mont Royal.
"Edward, you haven't told me yet about your visit to the site yesterday. What exactly happened?"
Sanders glanced across the table, puzzled by Max's air of detachment. "You've probably seen as much as I have-the whole forest is vitrifying. By the way, do you know Thorensen at all?"
"Our telephone line goes through his mine office. I've met him a few times-that suit belonged to one of his engineers. He's always up to some private game of his own."
"What about this woman living with him-Serena Ventress? I take it their affair is common gossip here?"
"Not at all-Ventress, you say her name is? Probably some cocotte he picked up in a Libreville dance-hall."
"Not exactly." Sanders decided to say no more. As they finished breakfast he described his arrival at Port Matarre and the journey to Mont Royal, concluding with his visit to the inspection site. At the end, as they walked out past the empty wards on either side of the courtyard, he hinted at Professor Tatlin's explanation of the Hubble Effect and what he himself felt to be its real significance.
Max, however, seemed to have little interest in all this. Obviously he regarded the crystallizing forest as a freak of nature that would soon exhaust itself and let him get on with the job of nursing Suzanne. Sanders's oblique references to her he sidestepped deftly. With some pride he showed Sanders around the hospital, pointing out the additional wards and X-ray facilities which he and Suzanne had introduced during their short stay.
"Believe me, Edward, it's been quite a job, though I wouldn't take too much credit for ourselves. The mine companies provide most of the patients and consequently most of the money."
They were walking along the perimeter fence on the eastern side of the hospital. In the distance, beyond the single-story buildings, they could see the full extent of the forest, its soft light shining like a stained-glass canopy in the morning sun. Although still held back by the perimeter road near the Bourbon Hotel, the affected zone seemed to have spread several miles down-river, extending itself through the forested areas along the banks. Two hundred feet above the jungle the air seemed to glitter continuously, as if the crystallizing atoms were deliquescing in the wind and being replaced by those rising from the forest below.
The sounds of shouting and the thwacks of bamboo canes distracted Sanders. Fifty yards away a group of hospital porters were moving through the trees on the other side of the fence. They were driving back a throng of natives that Sanders noticed sitting in the shadows under the branches. In what seemed to be a show of strength, the porters blew their whistles and beat the ground around the natives' feet.
Looking beneath the trees, Sanders realized that there were at least two hundred of the natives, hunched together in small groups around their bundles and sticks, gazing out at the distant forest with dead eyes. All of them appeared to be crippled or diseased, with deformed faces and skeleton-like shoulders and arms. Those driven back retreated a few yards into the trees, dragging their sick with them, but the others sat their ground. They seemed unaware of the sticks and whistles. Sanders guessed that they were not drawn to the hospital by any hopes of help and attention, but regarded it merely as a temporary shield between the forest and themselves.
"Max, who the devil-?" Sanders stepped over the wire fence. The nearest group was twenty yards from him, the dark bodies almost invisible in the refuse and undergrowth below the trees.
"Some mendicant tribe," Max explained, following Sanders over the fence. He acknowledged the salute of one of the porters. "Don't worry about them, they move around here all the time. Believe me, they don't really want help."
"But, Max-" Sanders walked a few paces across the clearing. The natives had so far watched him without expression, but now, as he approached them, they at last showed some reaction. An old man with a puffy head crouched down as if to shrink from Sanders's gaze. Another with mutilated hands hid them between his knees. There seemed to be no children, but here and there Sanders saw a small bundle strapped to the back of a crippled woman. Everywhere there was the same stirring movement as they shifted slowly in their places, little more than their shoulders moving as if aware that there was no possibility of hiding themselves.
"Max, these are-"
Clair took his arm. He started to pull Sanders back to the fence. "Yes, Edward, they are. They're lepers. They follow you across the world, don't they? I'm sorry we can't do anything for them."
"But Max-!" Sanders swung round. He pointed to the deserted wards within the compound. "The hospital's empty! Why have you turned them out?"
"We haven't." Clair looked away from the trees. "They come from a small camp-hardly a _léproserie_- which one of the Catholic fathers kept going. When he left they just drifted off into the bush. It was badly run, anyway, all he did for them was say a few prayers, and not many of those, if what I've heard is true. Now they've come back-it's the light from the forest, I suppose-"
"But why not take some of them in? You've got enough room for a few dozen cases."
"Edward, we're not equipped to deal with them. Even if we wanted to, it wouldn't work. Believe me, I've got to think of Suzanne. We all have our difficulties, you know."
"Of course." Sanders collected himself. "I understand, Max. You've both done more than your share."
Max climbed the fence into the compound. The porters had moved along the trees and were now driving back the last of the lepers, rapping the older ones and cripples over their legs when they were slow to move.
"I'll be in my surgery, Edward. Perhaps we can have a drink at eleven. Let one of the porters know if you go out."
Sanders waved to him, then walked away along the clearing. The porters had completed their job and were going back to the gatehouse, canes over their shoulders. The lepers had retreated into the deep shadows, almost out of sight, but Sanders could feel their eyes staring through him at the forest beyond, the one link between this barely recognizable residue of humanity and the world around it.
"Doctor! Dr. Sanders!"
Sanders turned to see Louise Peret coming toward him from an army staff car parked by the entrance. She waved to the French lieutenant watching from the driving window. He saluted her with a flourish and drove off.
"Louise- Aragon said you were coming this morning."
Louise reached him. Smiling broadly, she took his arm. "I almost didn't recognize you, Edward. This suit, it's like a disguise."
"I feel I need it now." With a half-laugh Sanders pointed to the trees twenty yards from them, but Louise failed to notice the lepers sitting in the shadows.
" Aragon told me you'd been caught in the forest," she went on, glancing critically at Sanders. "But you seem all in one piece. I've been talking to Dr. Tatlin, the physicist, he's explained all his theories about the forest-very complicated, believe me, all about the stars and time, you'll be amazed when I tell you."
"I'm sure I will." Happy to listen to her blithe chatter, Sanders slipped his arm through hers and steered her along the clearing toward the group of chalets at the rear of the hospital. After the antiseptic odors and the atmosphere of illness and compromise with life, Louise's brisk stride and fresh body seemed to come from a forgotten world. Her white skirt and blouse shone against the dust and the somber trees with their hidden audience. Feeling her hips against his own, Sanders almost believed for a moment that he was walking away with her for ever from Mont Royal, the hospital and the forest.
"Louise!" With a laugh he broke into her rapid résumé of her evening at the army base. "For God's sake, shut up. You may not realize it, but you're giving me a catalogue of all
the exchange officers at the camp!"
"I'm not! What do you mean? Hey, where are you taking me?"
"Coffee-for you. A drink for me. We'll go to my chalet, Max's houseboy will bring some over for us."
Louise hesitated. "All right. But what about-?"
"Suzanne?" Sanders shrugged. "She's asleep."
"What? Now?"
"She always sleeps during the day-at night she has to run the dispensary. To tell the truth, I've hardly seen her." He added hastily, aware that this was not necessarily the answer Louise wanted to hear: "It was pointless coming here-the whole thing has been a complete anti-climax."
Louise nodded at this. "Good," she said, as if only halfconvinced. "Perhaps that's as it should be. And your friend-the husband?"
Before Sanders could reply Louise had stopped and taken his arm. Startled, she pointed under the trees. Here, away from the road and the gatehouse, the lepers had been driven back only a few yards, and their watching faces were plainly visible. "Edward! There, those people! What are they?"
"They're human," Sanders said evenly. With faint sarcasm he added: "Don't be frightened."
"I'm not. But what are they doing? My God, there are hundreds of them! They were here all the time we were talking."
"I don't suppose they bothered to listen." Sanders motioned Louise through a gap in the fence. "Poor devils, they're just sitting there spellbound."
"How do you mean? By me?"
Sanders laughed aloud at this. Taking Louise's arm again, he held it tightly. "My dear, what have those Frenchmen been doing to you? _I'm_ spellbound by you, but I'm afraid those people are only interested in the forest."
They walked across the small courtyard and entered Sanders's chalet. He rang the bell for the Clairs' houseboy and then ordered some coffee for Louise and whisky and soda for himself. When these arrived they settled themselves in the lounge. Sanders switched on the overhead fan and removed his jacket.
"Taking off your disguise now?" Louise asked.
The Crystal World Page 12
